Quotes About Wisdom

The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress. With

If you want to go deeply into any subject, you need a lot of time, and in particular you need the privilege of wasting time. You need to experiment with unproductive paths, explore dead ends, make space for doubts and boredom, and allow little seeds of insight to slowly grow and blossom. If you cannot afford to waste time, you will never find the truth.

The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.

It is healthier for us to have questions we cannot answer, than to have answers we cannot question.

The real test of 'knowledge' is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers us.

So the best advice I could give a fifteen-year-old stuck in an outdated school somewhere in Mexico, India or Alabama is: don't rely on the adults too much. Most of them mean well, but they just don't understand the world.

the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.

We think we know far more today, but as individuals, we actually know far less.

We think we know a lot, even though individually we know very little, because we treat knowledge in the minds of others as if it were our own.

Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely. It is easier to manipulate a river by building a dam than it is to predict all the complex consequences this will have for the wider ecological system.

Many neo-liberal economists and political scientists argue that it is best to leave all the important decisions in the hands of the free market. They thereby give politicians the perfect excuse for inaction and ignorance, which are reinterpreted as profound wisdom. Politicians find it convenient to believe that the reason they don't understand the world is that they need not understand it.

In the early nineteenth century Wilhelm von Humboldt – one of the chief architects of the modern education system – said that the aim of existence is 'a distillation of the widest possible experience of life into wisdom'. He also wrote that 'there is only one summit in life – to have taken the measure in feeling of everything human'.

Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate paths. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power.

The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history. There

If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power.

For millions upon millions of years, feelings were the best algorithms in the world. Hence in the days of Confucius, of Muhammad or of Stalin, people should have listened to their feelings rather than to the teachings of Confucianism, Islam or communism. Yet

The prevailing feeling is that too many opportunities are opening too quickly and that our ability to modify genes is outpacing our capacity for making wise and farsighted use of the skill.

The real test of 'knowledge' is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers us. Scientists usually assume that no theory is 100 per cent correct. Consequently, truth is a poor test for knowledge. The real test is utility. A theory that enables us to do new things constitutes knowledge. Over

Today the main economic assets consist of technical and institutional knowledge rather than wheat fields, gold mines, or even oil fields, and you just cannot conquer knowledge through war.

Resumió sus enseñanzas en una única ley: el sufrimiento surge del deseo; la única manera de liberarse completamente del sufrimiento es liberarse completamente del deseo; y la única manera de liberarse del deseo es educar la mente para experimentar la realidad tal como es.

Piyasay? idare edenler bir karara varman?z için bin y?l oturup beklemeyecektir.

even rational leaders frequently end up doing very stupid things.

humains ont toujours excellé à inventer des outils, beaucoup moins à en faire un usage avisé. Il est plus facile de manipuler un fleuve en construisant un barrage qu'il ne l'est de prédire toutes les conséquences complexes que cela aura pour le système écologique plus large. De même sera-t-il plus facile de rediriger le flux de nos esprits que d'en deviner l'impact sur notre psychologie personnelle ou nos systèmes sociaux.

The Buddha taught that the three basic realities of the universe are that everything is constantly changing, nothing has any enduring essence, and nothing is completely satisfying.